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Snow blowhards
Like, dude, it's like skateboarding without wheels! Well, not exactly, but that's all you really need to know about snowboarding. You won't learn much more from First Descent but you'll hear a lot more because producer/directors Kemp Curly and Kevin Harrison are afraid of silence. The rock music's OK over scenes of people traveling down beautiful Alaskan snowscapes, but hardly ever does 30 seconds go by without someone talking; and every sentence includes at least one of the following words: awesome, dude, gnarly, amazing, stoked, cool. Unlike Dogtown and Z-Boys , which managed to make skateboarding interesting to someone with no interest in skateboarding, First Descent only makes snowboarding interesting to those who already have the interest. For the rest of us it's snowboring. Five expert snowboarders, ranging in age from 18 to 40, are flown to Valdez , Alaska , to try some mountains that haven't been boarded before. Shawn Farmer and Nick Perata are the old men of the mountains. Shaun White, who looks like Napoleon Dynamite with longer hair, and Hannah Teter are 18 but Shaun's already been Grand Marshal at the Southern 500. Norway 's Terje Haakonsen is 30. Halfway through they're joined for a few days by Travis Rice, 22, possibly as an excuse to show footage of him at a competition in the Tokyo Dome where the pyrotechnics make it look like a rock concert and the fans eat it up. The film's most impressive moment (which gets two or three instant replays) comes when Travis triggers an avalanche but manages to ride it out. It's literally breathtaking. Some other rides are impressive and well photographed but nothing compares to this. Although one guy thinks snowboarding "has evolved over more than a hundred years," the consensus is that it emerged in the 1970s, was adopted in the '80s by people with "some behavior and attitude problems" and was finally embraced by ski resorts in the '90s when they saw how many young people it was bringing to the slopes. It became a (Winter) Olympics event in 1998. Since First Descent comes from the studio that gave us the American Pie trilogy I kept expecting a subplot about which of the guys was going to nail Hannah (although she grew up with four older brothers so she can probably take care of herself), but it never came. Narration is by Henry Rollins with comments from the featured snowboarders and others involved in the sport. All express their passion with a seriousness usually reserved for cancer research. At the screening I attended it took them about four minutes to turn on the sound. The audience didn't know when it was well off. Steve Warren is a local actor and film reviewer. His reviews can also be seen weekly in the Sunday Paper. |
First Descent
Directed by: Kemp Curly, Kevin Harrison 
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(2½ out of 4)